Skywatch (The Wild Storm)
With this proof of the existence of aliens, this group considered the havoc that would ensue if the aliens had to negotiate with multiple human polities at once. To prevent this, they created Skywatch, a secret space program which would handle any such negotiations, should they become necessary. However, to prevent any mass panic at this prospect, Skywatch's very existence was kept secret, its only effective contact with the governments of Earth being that it held a veto over spacelaunches. In 1955, Skywatch's ongoing mission led to them to stage a mission to Mars . With their advanced engines, they traversed the distance in just over a month and built an underground forward base to hide from prying Earth-based eyes. Most of the astronauts died subsequently from cancers instigated by the lack of a Martian atmosphere. Sometime after this. Skywatch was the victim of an attempted infiltration by I.O., a secret American espionage agency. It was a tactic that International Operations had used before on other agencies - but impressively, Skywatch's ideology was so different from I.O.'s that they were able to free themselves, lading to the beginning of a conflict between the two powers. By the 1970s, the political situation had evolved, with I.O. co-operating with the Soviet Politburo to build the space technology necessary to get ahead of Skywatch. Skywatch, in a show of force, destroyed the facility they were using for this, codenamed "Science City Zero", resulting in the deaths of some twenty thousand residents. In the wake of this, a series of treaties were brokered between the clandestine powers of the human race, the main result of which was a non-agression pact between Skywatch and I.O. Skywatch agreed to make its space efforts less visible, while I.O. vowed to never again fund space research. Under these new terms, Skywatch funded the Incision project, an experimental engine intended to allow interstellar voyages by travelling through a sub-space dimension nicknamed "The Bleed". The craft exploded and the project was abandoned. Skywatch also maintained a human enhancement research program, producing people with various inhuman or posthuman abilities. Though the research was based on their space station, the subjects remained on Earth, as their abilities were deemed too dangerous to the valuable space station, and Skywatch preferred to leave them on Earth, where any damage would befall bystanders and worthless civilian infrastructure. Two years ago, Skywatch and I.O. sent their leaders to a meeting in Zagreb, Croatia, called the Druga Event. Skywatch's leader by this time was Henry Bendix. Bendix's ideal goal is to be allowed to use Skywatch's technology to terraform Mars and Venus without being answerable to anyone, but the treaties brought obligations towards secrecy. Skywatch maintains a roster of agents called "Ground Division", headquartered in New York, whose goal is to investigate useful or dangerous technology, and acquire it by fair means or foul, for the use of the agency. Everyone Is Looking Up A public jetpack sighting in New York during a botched I.O. assassination would have a significant effect on Skywatch. Ground Division began investigating the jetpack flightpath, with an eye for acquisition. Meanwhile, Skywatch agent Christine Trelane was able to recruit the assassin away from I.O. with a promise of medical care. Trelane brought the assassin to a "new" organization, Executive Protection Services, in San Francisco, which assassinates bad people with amazing technology (such as seasteading, chemical mastery of the fight-or-flight response, and transgenic genetic modification) while helping Michael Cray deal with a brain tumor. Lucy Blaze, the top member of Ground Division, tracked the jetpack to Camp Hero in Montauk, NY, where she lost the trail amid evidence of a firefight. However, an anonymous source provided video evidence that the jetpack was derived from technology used in old Skywatch spacecraft, which made Bendix suspect I.O. trickery, and order Blaze to turn her investigation on I.O. When this investigation turned up evidence of an unrelated crime - a hack on Skywatch's orbiting servers, disguised to implicate North Korean hackers - Bendix ordered the assassination of an I.O. agent. With I.O.'s response - a covert action team sent to Skywatch's New York office with orders to kill all occupants - tensions between the two agencies seemed ready to tip into active conflict . So, in seeming prudence, Bendix ordered the authoring of a plan to destroy I.O. As part of this, he deployed a weapon called the "Little Stick", which destroyed an abandoned I.O. facility, and was intended as a gesture of intimidation. The plan, provided by his deputy, Lauren Pennington, would have the eventual outcome of not only destroying I.O., but preventing another group rising to their stature ever again. In the service of that plan, Skywatch began a program of kidnapping whole isolated towns of people in the American midwest. | Equipment = | Transportation = * Skywatch's preferred craft in the 1970s was the Breslau II spacecraft, a "flying saucer" using an electromagnetic propulsion system and a four-man crew. This design has entered conspiracy theory lore on this Earth, being used in the music videos of the singer "Voodoo". ** However, technology has moved on, and current models of that design seem to require a carrier aircraft. * They also use spacecraft which resemble airplanes, for space travel. | Weapons = | Notes = | Trivia = * Skywatch is an organization native to The Wild Storm continuity. However, it is inspired by two groups from the original Wildstorm Universe continuity: StormWatch, a space-based United Nations superhuman crisis response agency, and the Four, a group of villains who controlled a conspiracy that began as a secret part of NASA but tore loose and persistently stole interesting technologies for their own use. | Recommended = | Links = }}